One of the primary reasons was that I got fed up with managing a Ruby
development environment across all my machines. In spite of my
rantings, I'm sure Ruby and Ruby installs are fine - it's just
something that I'd have to deal with on a recurring basis for one
specific task - other than for Jekyll blogging, I don't use Ruby.

So while a platform based on Python - generally my go to language,
made sense, the other driving force for the switch was the fact that
Emacs and org-mode have become such major parts of my workflow and
productivity.

What do I use org-mode for?

lesson planning

document preparation (instead of LaTeX)

note taking

blogging

email (with mu4e)

managing my schedule

tracking bookmarks

and probably a lot more.

Jekyll is actually a really nice tool. It's simple. You put together a
simple directory structure: Templates in _layouts, blog posts in
_posts, drafts in _drafts. Other directories that start with an
underscore are ignored and everything else is copied up to your site.

I love that it's "close to the metal" You can put in html files with
some meta information up top or markdown.

The beauty is that you just push your files up to GitHub and it
automatically runs Jekyll and builds your site (more info here).

The problem is that Jekyll doesn't play well with org-mode and
org-markup so my workflow became something like this

Create a post something.org in the _org directory.

From within emacs, publish it. I've configured org-mode to publish

by exporting the org-mode markup file to html and saving it in the
_drafts directory.

If it looks good, copy and rename the file from _drafts to the

_posts directory and push it up to GitHub.

A little clunky, but it works. The bigger problem was the amount of
time I'd spend putting html blocks into my org formatted posts to get
them to look the way I wanted (or at least close enough).

Enter Nikola.

Nikola's a much more powerful tool. It does much more but as a result
is much more complex. Normally, that's not my style but in this case
since It's Python, things balance out.

I still have to figure out the entire templating system and all the
plugins but getting started was pretty quick.

The big win is that Nikola supports a ton of formats for your posts
and pages. Native org-mode support for me was what did it for me. On top of
that, although I haven't tested it yet, is that there's also an
org-mode plugin to export to Nikola restructure text.